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The Met and a New Logo

The letters seem to lean together, evoking the tapering walls of Temple of Dendur.Credit
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Who knew a logo could cause such controversy?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new official design, which generated strong negative reactions this week, is part of a larger rebranding effort that the museum says is meant to signal a more welcoming, accessible, current institution.

“It’s the right direction,” Daniel Brodsky, the museum’s chairman, said in a telephone interview Friday. “It’s a changing institution; the world is changing around us, and I think it’s time for the Met to move forward.”

Not everyone shares Mr. Brodsky’s enthusiasm for the new look, which was supposed to have been announced on March 1 — with the press preview of the Met Breuer in the former Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue — but leaked out through the museum’s posters and mailings.

“In capital letters: ATROCIOUS,” said the prominent designer Karim Rashid. “We’re talking here about a museum that’s all about history. So the best thing they could do is hang on to keeping their mark — or their logo — historic.”

“They were really wanting to kick off an active effort to expand the reach and relevance of the Met,” said Amy Lee, the strategy director at Wolff Olins. “One of the amazing things about the Met is its incredible breadth and depth covering over 5,000 years of art across cultures. That is a huge asset, but it’s also quite a big challenge for them. Many people who encounter the Met can be overwhelmed by it; it can be quite hard to navigate.”

In coming up with the visual component, Ms. Lee said her firm consulted with an advisory committee of nearly 30 museum employees from different departments ranging from curatorial to visitor experience. The design featuring conjoined letters grew out of the theme of connection, and the font is meant to be both classical and modern.

Photo

The Met and its old logo outside the building in 2013.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

“The mark needed to have an elegance to it, because the Met is a kind of icon,” Ms. Lee said, “but also have a timelessness to it, so that it can appeal and be welcoming to people of all ages.”

Among the rejected ideas was labeling the museum’s different locations like, “The Met Madison” or “The Met Fifth Avenue,” Mr. Brodsky said, adding, “I did not like that at all.”

The logo prompted something of a media firestorm after Justin Davidson, the architecture critic at New York magazine, called it a “graphic misfire” in an online column posted Wednesday.

Mr. Davidson, who saw the design on a Met mailing, wrote that “the whole ensemble looks like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs. Worse, the entire top half of the new logo consists of the word the.”

The current logo — which features the letter ‘M’ and was based on a woodcut by Fra Luca Pacioli, who taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci — has been in use since 1971. Because it was featured for decades on every admission button, the symbol became visually identified with the Met. It remains ubiquitous on the museum’s website and publications.

But a few people applauded the change. Dylan C. Lathrop, a Los Angeles graphic designer and illustrator, tweeted that the logo was “cool,” and added that “haters can check out the science museum or whatever.”

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Responding to the backlash, Ms. Lee said: “We want to create things that are conversation-worthy but that ultimately are in service to the strategic needs of our clients and their audiences.”

The reactions perhaps should have been expected. In 2013, the Met was criticized for phasing out its well-known metal admission buttons, which had became a tourist totem, and replacing the tin-plate pieces with less expensive, more efficient detachable stickers.

“I’m one for change, but there’s places to do change and there’s places not to do change,” Mr. Rashid, the designer, said. “Museums don’t need to be fashionable.”

Correction: February 23, 2016

An article on Saturday about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new logo referred imprecisely to the firm Wolff Olins, which designed it. While it has offices in London, as well as in other cities, it is not based there and the project was completed by the New York office.

A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Met, Courting Criticism, in Caps. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe